Prairie waste station ready
Facility planned since 1992, fully funded
To introduce the Rathdrum Prairie’s latest large-scale addition, the Prairie Transfer Station, Kootenai County Solid Waste is inviting the public to check out the facility with an open house and ribbon-cutting this Friday from 10 a.m. until noon.
The 38,000-square-foot facility – almost three times the size of the current Ramsey Road Transfer Station – is north of Post Falls on Pleasant View Road at Prairie Avenue. With construction complete on the $10.7 million station, which sits on a 67-acre site that began being developed for the garbage drop-off site in November last year, only a few final kinks in finish work and computer software need to be ironed out before its early 2009 opening. A staff of 14 will operate the facility.
“Approximately eight years ago we started the search for a new transfer station because the current site here at Ramsey is so overwhelmed,” said Kootenai County Solid Waste director Roger Saterfiel, adding that the original station, which will remain open, was built in the early 1990s to handle a peak of about 150 tons of garbage per day and no more than 400 users, but now sees more than 950 visitors each day who drop off an estimated 700 tons of garbage. “This was in our plans since ’92, when we started planning for a new facility and putting money away … . We waited to build it until we had the money in the bank. We don’t have to ask for any more money from the community.”
The prairie site was chosen in part because of its industrial-zoned designation, which the community was adamant about from the beginning. Just as important, though, is it presented the ability to ship garbage by train to an out-of-the-area landfill. With several thousand feet of rail line access out its back door, the transfer station would only need to add an intra-modal yard in the future, essentially a secondary set of tracks offset from the main line where waste containers could be stacked and stored.
But that’s looking way down the line, Saterfiel said.
“We should not have to add onto, or increase the site for 20 years,” he said. “It will handle today’s garbage and it will handle garbage for the next 20 years. I will be the first one to say we overbuilt the facility.”
Meeting Kootenai County’s future waste needs is a priority for the solid waste department. The Prairie station, which was built according to calculations that assumed yearly population increases of 5 percent, will help meet those demands by prolonging the life of the Fighting Creek landfill. In fact, Saterfiel said he expects the Prairie Transfer Station will eventually take on as much 40 percent of the Ramsey site’s workload.
While the landfill will almost certainly fill up by the middle of the century, he added, “Who knows 20 to 30 years from now where technology will be? But we had to build it according to today’s technology.”
For residents of the Rathdrum Prairie and surrounding vicinity, the new transfer station offers a nearby trash alternative to an area that had, until now, gone without. “Hopefully what it means is they will have better service and won’t have to drive to Coeur d’Alene,” Saterfiel said.
The Prairie Transfer Station’s operations will remain largely identical to those at the Ramsey site, including the recycling programs – at least for now. “With this economy, it is killing the recycling big-time,” he said. However, he added, “we are not giving up on that at all. We have too much at stake.”